Oracle Blog

On Open Source Software, web apps ...

Wednesday Jun 11, 2008

We run an internally developed AMP benchmark to understand the performance characteristics of the AMP stack on various platforms.

We did some comparisons of the AMP stack in Cool Stack 1.2 with the one in Cool Stack 1.3. We didn't see any signficant difference in performance in the Apache/PHP tier between the two versions. However, there is a dramatic improvement in performance in the MySQL tier using Cool Stack 1.3. Cool Stack 1.2 shipped with MySQL 5.0.45 and 1.3 now has MySQL 5.1.24.

The graph below shows the CPU utilization on the MySQL system at different load levels :

MySQL 5.1 is 4x more efficient than 5.0.45 ! There are improvements in the Query Cache and query optimization in MySQL 5.1, but at this point we are doing more analysis to understand the reasons for the dramatic performance increase. Here is another graph that shows the network throughput at different load levels :

It appears that some of that efficiency comes from driving much less load on the network as well. We know that the client API has changed in 5.1, but it is amazing how much of a difference it makes in terms of performance.

So, the bottom-line is : Upgrade to MySQL 5.1 in Cool Stack 1.3 and share your experiences. I'm very interested in finding out what others see in terms of performance.

About

I'm a Senior Staff Engineer in the Performance & Applications Engineering Group (PAE). This blog focuses on tips to build, configure, tune and measure performance of popular open source web applications on Solaris.